Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

I just installed ArchLinux for the first time and MAN... this reminds me of fighting with Slackware/RedHat/FreeBSD back in the mid to late 90's!!!

I configured WiFi on my laptop during install and it worked fine for the next couple of days. I returned to my day job this week and plugged in to my ethernet connection and configured it. After returning home, I could no longer connect to wireless via any means. doing a journalctl -f I see that it's trying to associate but getting a associate/authenticate failure. I've googled around a bit and tried a ton of things. Killing the wpa_supplicant process and running wifi-menu gives me the same failure to authenticate.

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

How are you managing your networks? Netcfg?Netctl?NetworkManager?Wicd?Flying it by hand?

Can you see your router with sudo iw wlan0 scan(Be sure to replace wlan0 with whatever your network is called [you can find that with ip link ])

Also, check that it is not blocked with rfkill list

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael FaradaySometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing----How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

netcfg is what I'm using. (it's what I setup the laptop with) My interface is wlp2s0.

I do have the NetworkManager service enabled.

I can see all available wireless networks in my neighborhood (including mine) using Gnome's network widget, and wifi-menu. I do have a profile in /etc/network.d/netcfg called "wlp2s0-shoes". "shoes" is my SSID.

In /etc/network.d/NetworkManager/system-connections there is a profile called "Auto shoes". Is it possible these two are trampling over one another?

I've tried stopping both services, but my network never returns. After a suspend/resume, wireless is gone.

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

You should *not* use more than one network manager at the same time.

Edit: If you "stop both services" how do you expect it to come back? Choose one and stick with it. I like connman, but netctl is pretty great too. It might be wise to ditch netcfg and switch to netctl since netcfg is no longer maintained. Netctl is now in [core] as well.

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

No, I had stopped them one at a time and doing ip link set wlp2s0 down then up... rebooted with just NetworkManager enabled and it looks like it will do the trick.

I really do appreciate the help. Like I said, 15 years ago I fought these types of battles all the time (xf86config, ifwadmin, compiling kernels with make menu-config) but using Ubuntu since 2006ish has made me soft.

I'll check out netctl. Browsing some of the issues I see here, I may wait a bit till it settles.

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

I just switched to connman about a week ago full time. But I had been using netctl since Jouke announced it on [arch-projects], and it has been unbelievably stable, particularly for not having actually reached a 1.0 release. I found it to be actually more reliable than netcfg because it actually is designed for systemd and uses the BindsTo= confiuration parameter to ensure that it actually waits for the network device in question to be fully available before trying to get a lease.

I think these days, things are likely much much easier than 15 years ago. If you could make it through those days, I think this should be no problem. Of course if you want to go back to those kinds of ways, there is always Gentoo/Funtoo, CRUX, or SLS to venture to. Though I don't particularly like the GCC screensaver.

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

Yeah, I did notice my DHCP wait time needed to be increased just a bit. netcfg wasn't obeying the value set in the netcfg configuration. When I get more time, I'll play with the options.

15 years ago I was in my early 20s and didn't mind staying up till 3AM fighting with a 166Mhz Pentium and NetBSD... I did use Gentoo for a couple of months. But like you said... the GCC screensaver gets old.

Re: Wireless network only works when ethernet cable is plugged in

A bit OT. Something worth fighting with IMO is setting up systemd --user. You can make it so that your entire user session is managed and controlled by systemd. This makes it possible to be using one window manager/DE, gnome for instance, and be able to switch to a different one, like KDE or openbox, w/o closing any applications. But it also is able to monitor things that you think should be restarted if they fail as well, which is nice.

Instead of playing with the options for netcfg, ust switch to netctl. The format is nearly identical (uses camelcase instead) and the configurations are instead held in /etc/netctl. Otherwise it is pretty damn similar.

If you want a faster dhcp lease, I find connman to be ridiculously fast in that repsect. I'm not sure what it is using to get the lease, but it certainly is faster than other network managers. Just be aware that the package in the repos conflicts with openresolv, which netctl depends on. Though I have not been able to figure out why they do. If you use connman-git from the AUR, this conflict has been removed in the PKGBUILD, and things still seem to work just fine on my machine.